A new live CD from the Williamsburg pianist reflects a broad range of influences.

Bruce Hornsby spent much of the past three years challenging himself on stage. Now he has used those shows to put together a new two-disc set that he acknowledges will challenge his listeners.

"Solo Concerts," released last week on the Vanguard label, contains 20 songs recorded between 2011 and early this year. Each performance features Hornsby and his piano, with no backing musicians. The styles range from blues and boogie-woogie to the highly esoteric 12-tone classical form developed by Austrian composer Arnold Schoenberg in the 1920s.

"That's the goal here – to expose people to some more adventurous musical areas," Hornsby said by phone from his Williamsburg home. "I've tried to find a way to perform it in a context that could be accessible. It's a very difficult challenge to take this dissonant, chromatic – most people would just say strange – music that I love and find a place for it in the context of popular songs."

These recordings are the latest reminder that Hornsby has long-since left behind the "pop star" stage of his career, when he had a string of pop hits from 1986-90. He still plays a handful of those hits each night, but he admits that is more a nod to the more casual fans who just assume they will be hearing "The Way it Is" and "The End of the Innocence." When he plays them today, especially in the solo format, it is in new arrangements that re-invent the familiar tunes.

Two of those hits turn up on "Solo Concerts" – "The Valley Road," a No. 5 hit in 1988, is presented as an ominous blues shuffle, and "Mandolin Rain" (No. 4 in 1987) is played in the minor key rendition he first did on his 2007 bluegrass album with Ricky Skaggs.

He knows that some fans want "a nostalgic night out with some good old songs." To those fans, he apologizes.

"It's not a creative endeavor to play it the old way," he says. "That's the museum piece approach: 'Here's the record I made, and I'm going to replicate it the same way as it was recorded.' That's not in my DNA. It's very difficult for me to do that.

"I'm about pushing the envelope and being creative as a musician all the time. That's what I want to do."

That's where Schoenberg's dodecaphony, or 12-tone serialism, comes into play. Hornsby describes it as an intricate method of composition that uses the dozen notes of the chromatic scale (the white and black notes of the piano, or every fret of the guitar) in a non-repetitive order, while eschewing a consistent "key center" for the song. This forces the composer to use all available notes, a tremendous harmonic challenge. (According to the Schoenberg Center's website, the composer once boasted of adding "another unplayable work to the repertoire.")

To a connoisseur, or a perfectionist such as Hornsby, it is a spectacularly detailed form that is very difficult to master.

To the untrained ear, it can sound like a series of atonal notes strung together without a discernible melody.

The real trick, Hornsby said, is to integrate it in a manner that makes it part of an accessible composition – rather than having it bring the song to a sudden halt.

Early on in the first disc of "Solo Concerts," he plays an excerpt of a Schoenberg concerto, which then segues into "Might As Well Be Me," a tune Hornsby co-wrote with the Grateful Dead's Robert Hunter using a comparable 12-tone row. Similar instrumental breaks pop up in other songs along the way.

He specifically mentions "Life in the Pyschotropics," one of several darkly comedic songs on "Solo Concerts" taken from his stage play "SCKBSTD."

"The pointillist mid-section of that song is just fun for me," Hornsby said, phonetically singing the piano notes out loud. "The second time through, if you listen closely you hear me kind of laugh in the middle of it. It's angular and crazy and, to me, fun. It's light-hearted dissonance."

Hornsby describes this music in terms of a strong pulse of "two-handed independence," in which the left hand lays down the rhythmic groove that would ordinarily be supplied by a backing band, while his right is free to play melodies and craft solos. He will be supporting the disc with a series of mostly solo concert dates this fall, the closest one in Raleigh, N.C.

After a show in North Carolina last year, reviewer Steve Jones of the Creative Loafing Charlotte entertainment blog wrote that a Hornsby solo performance is "akin to a musical conversation between his right and left hands … a virtuoso musical showcase of man and piano."

Again, he's not trying to reclaim pop stardom. (For what it's worth, his next project is an album of songs he composed on the dulcimer.) Instead, Hornsby is trying to play music that engages him, in a manner that entertains his audience.

Paul Shugrue, radio personality at Norfolk's NPR station WHRV-FM 89.5, said Hornsby's chart success in the late 1980s has allowed him more artistic freedom than a lot of other artists can manage.